May our legends live to tell / how we burned down heaven, & conquered hell

(The lives we make are all that matter --

so let's live

to love

and love

to live.)

Hey look some words made it out of my fingers finally

In Yon Photoshoppe I've been shaping landscapes lately--strange swooping and dripping things unbound by physical constraints and probably more surrealist than anything I've watched come out of my fingers before. They're not great, but I feel like they're going places, if only I can poke at them long enough.
On the job side of things: customers continue to range from grumpy to wonderful. I am tired of people steamrolling me in conversations, though -- be they managers or customers. It makes me feel invalidated, and I can't tell if I'm boring them or if they're just in a hurry. I've been trying not to overwhelm people with information, but... it's a bookstore(?) & am not sure if doin' it rite.

Your dose of anguish today is one that's been on my mind for awhile: reading requires a time investment, and the more time you spend in a bookstore or library the more time you will spend finding books to enjoy. There are a lot of "bad" books out there (depending on taste), but even if you avoid those as you dig you will likely find many more books to read than will be possible within a given lifetime. You will never be able to experience all the good books in the world, but only a small fraction (the same is true of reality -- it is too vast for us to be able to truly experience all but the smallest & most subjective sliver).
Of course, the optimistically converse aspect of this is that we have time in this world to enjoy books at all.

Ring the bells that still can ring,

& sing your stupid head off to

the ones who are not listening

Weeaboo Wednesday

Hey, do you remember

that song that went well with the glow of the sunset?

You always fell silent

and sadly sang it to yourself

Now, time passes,

and that melody is stained in sepia, oh!

We can never go back, oh, friends

You seem farther away than a stranger

We were always running, oh, friends

I loved that look in your eyes

Where did we fall apart, oh, friends?

On days when I hung my head we gazed at each other

And when we linked fingers, oh, friends

I felt as if time had stopped

Between Dance in the Vampire Bund and Arakawa Under the Bridge my bittersweet-romance meter is pretty high lately. DitVB has a lot (A LOT) of fanservice (in MANY forms), but the voice actress who plays Mina Tepes has some MAD skills, and it's got a strong story. Also, Mina Tepes could eat your face off (my team).

AUtB is quirky and sweet -- but also more subtle & harder to define. I'd try to review it, but I think I need to see more episodes first. I like its treatment of outcasts so far, though -- it's a very accepting atmosphere, and the entire river setting is incredibly peaceful.

ZA PAYPUH

PROTEIGON from BURAYAN on Vimeo.

I hope you love me when you know me well

(N)one

Two:

Three:

Ohnoguesswhohasbeenreadingtropesagaingetthemooooouuuuutttt

Our love is not the light it was

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin, or the shape of their eyes, or the shape I'm in? Should I hate 'em for having our jobs today?
No: I hate the men sent the jobs away.


"Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space."


"...nation's current space efforts 'embarrassing and unacceptable,'..."

(& something lighter)

A still more glorious dawn awaits

How come you never go there

Love and art and art and love and the struggle and the sorrow and the suffering
& the anguished hope of lovers' hearts together in the massive dark.

I cede that I am only a girl holding tight;
our planet spins through endless night.

A completed project? In MY blog?!

It'smorelikelyetc.

Illustrations for a magical project of learning my almost-teacher BFF is putting together. Also did another, larger alien holding a sweet holograph of South America, since that's what the kids are learning about... but I kind of burnt out on that one, so it's not as finished-looking & I shan't waste space on it here.

It takes an ocean not to break

She journeyed into books and found they were just the tip of the iceberg. Her attempts at destroying herself had all failed; the hurricane had swept over her and through her, and amid the destruction a calm had touched her, and she knew she would be safe.

She watched in one ethereal moment as the physics came together in her mind and the pattern of the raindrops made a sense perfect to her understanding. Here, there was pattern within no pattern. Here, there was purpose.

Her feet touched the ice and she knew she would never freeze.

Where was her beloved? Here and here and here

and

here.

Repost from Gameful

I am not my information –
not my station, or location;
I am the ceaseless adaptation
of logic and imagination:
a life along a long migration.
So go tell your corporation
that, though it can try to trend me,
it will never comprehend me:
I’ll keep sifting through creation
for relations that transcend me.


Poems in passing here amassing from the past sing everlasting

Which must leave

Today I learned from Bill Maher and Jonathan Franzen that you can worship at the altar of literature. Well in that case, I accept the original Dune series as a mystical experience and reject the rest as blasphemy. Seriously, just brushing past it on Wikipedia made me rage; a character named 'Omnius'? That's really all I need to see. Wtf, Brian Herbert. Wtf.


Also, found this quote for the first time:


"As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that turn into paradox. The central paradox concerns the human vision of time. What about Paul's gift of prescience — the Presbyterian fixation? For the Delphic Oracle to perform, it must tangle itself in a web of predestination. Yet predestination negates surprises and, in fact, sets up a mathematically enclosed universe whose limits are always inconsistent, always encountering the unprovable. It's like a kōan, a Zen mind breaker."


Frank Herbert, you summed up in a paragraph what I have been struggling with for like a year and a half.
Why do you have to be gone?

I'm sorry I will never be able to express to you (and so many other authors) my boundless gratitude for your influence on my life, and I promise that if I ever untangle the threads of this time travel story I will endeavor to make it something that would make you (all) proud.

& Oh... ohmygod just please don't ever let me go

In the world I see you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower, and when you look down you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.



Let down your hair;
let down your hair.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel:
let down your hair.

$200 is shaped like not enough for rent / this sadness trope is a sadness trope.

Another one of those fun/odd shuffle transitions:
Life Is Pain (Leftover Crack) ---> Your Head is on Fire (Broken Bells)

Still underemployed & underutilized, still grateful for a job at all.
Does my store really need a teen paranormal romance section more than a horror section, and why do I seem to be the only one there who finds this very sad? $40 is acceptable for several diet books but not for one art book, and the poetry section is the tidiest in the store because no one reads poetry books and somehow it is more unusual to notice this & realize the crushing sorrow of it than it is to not read poetry at all.

Generally the most efficient way I've found to get out from under that particular blanket of despair is to replace it with pure rage at carrying those small publishers who only exist to reprint Wikipedia information at exorbitant prices. Who is driving this fucking bookstore?

Customers will occasionally forgo both greetings & pleasantries and snap a title at me as though I were a search engine rather than a human woman. Please remember that when you dehumanize others you are only dehumanizing yourself, and that we are all small here.



Bookbot so very tired.

How did we end so far out?

our names are
written in water


the knowledge
is all around us


we came here
to be washed away






Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.

Our house has been gripped in the maw of a loathsome pestilence. Fortunately, there is Grooveshark. And naps. And orange juice. So much orange juice.
Bathory to Quiet Company is a weird shuffle transition. I'm going for more orange juice.
Life continues to be what it be.

Am I right, ladies?

On ones and twos

Found out yesterday that this was finally happening.
Oh
em
gee

She's bound to run amok

"The ocean of your own breath is the mosque or temple you dream of. Your tongue in your mouth is the rock from which you could launch yourself into heaven."


This army has so many hands.
Are you one of us?

Carl Sagan, where are you?

lets get our asses back into space into space where we can let the world rest from our madness our sadness lets let the world grow backas we float above it let it grow and bloom and green again and lets let our childrenschildrenschildrenchildren learn our storiesoflovingearth letslet them become explorers with dreams of home and maybe we can come back and the bonobos will be all grown up into something new and we can have another friend in the universe and hope and love and joy and
gladness.
radness.

Rise up: rise up.

"Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it."

The unpracticed poet

Dearest other,
everything and all you contain:
I verymuch like to play in your
second dimension
and that place
where there is no dimension at all, that place.
thank you for thismost recent upwelldownwell
wellwell.
Thank you for mirrors and thank you for fiction
thank you for poetry, mirrors and diction.

Creatives! Drown your heart with tears
Until it gasps out its desire
take up your courage,
kill your fears
and leave that place with fire.

A deer, a deer, my dear.

Are swans deceiving us all?
Oh I, for one, should know;
I never felt myself so graceful,
and I never swam so slow.

The dog days are over, the dog days are done. Can you hear the horses? 'Cause here they come.